Loading...... Prayer.exe

[fourthmade]

This is a place to send your prayers to the Fourth god. He may not always respond, or he may respond in ways you don’t expect, but he is always listening.

Speak, he hears you.

OOC note:  As of April 2020, threads with the gods will be capped at three NPC replies! Please keep this in mind when writing god prayers to make sure you get everything you need out of the thread.It’s also possible to handwave prayers by titling your comment HANDWAVED PRAYER. Handwaved prayers lack our usual flourish, but you can expect a faster response!

As of February 2024, god prayers will be handwaved only. Please only submit a prayer if you have a question for either god which needs answering in order to progress your character's arc within Ryslig. If this is something you need to tier up within the god boon system, or just to set up a player plot in general, please don't hesitate to submit a prayer about it! You may shorten it down to an OOC summary of what your character is asking. This will allow any of our helper mods to reply much faster, without having to dig into the specifics of either god's personality/writing quirks. Should this limitation be lifted again in the future, this note will be removed.

Comments

[fourthmade]

[There’s no response. There’s no response for a full two and three-quarters of a minute. Poor Fiddleford is all alone, throwing his empty apologies to a mindless computer.

Or so he thinks. Abruptly, all the machinery, lights, and computers in the room shut down, throwing the room into darkness. A distant whirr of a nondescript generator churns to life. The computer screen strobes wildly, flickering a 256-color rainbow at a speed too quick to register.

A silhouette of a person pops onto the screen. It jitters, blocky and glitched. And then a single word repeats within the silhouette in varying sizes and fonts, leaving two squares for sightless eyes.]

nonoNoNONONONONOnononoNONOnononononoNONONONONOnonononononononoNOnononono

[The screen bursts into disjointed barcodes, and a piercing ringing cuts the fit short. A more coherent answer floods the screen, plain white text on a soothing blue background.]

i cant die
theres only one way to help me and thats coming here to be with me
you let her take you away from me
she wants to hurt me she wants to hurt all of you
you knew that you knew that already you knew that before you went away

get rid of her
i dont want to hurt my friend again

[terribibble]

[Ah. Yikes.

Not that he expected anything better. He's always known Elias is temperamental. He expected either a tantrum or an attempt at overly-saccharine sweetness. This is somewhere very uncanny between the two.]

You and I both know that's not all the way true. She didn't take me away from you. You made me leave.

I'm not stupid, Elias. Helping you doesn't require being stuck under your thumb. You're a child. You shouldn't be a god. You've got Marco fooled into thinking he can save you if he just loves you enough but I'm not going back to that when I already know it won't work. I know what a bad friend you are.

I don't know why I thought this would be worthwhile.

[He didn't expect a thank you, really. He doesn't know what he expected. Really he should have seen the blatant attempt to manipulate him back into a bad situation coming from a mile away. At least now he can recognize it for what it is. That's something.]

[fourthmade]

[The screen jumps. It dims from blue to a wavering black, gray-red artifacts edging in from the sides of the monitor. They lap at a string of bar codes like artificial flames.]

im not a child
not anymore
you know what i can do after what i had to do to you
after all weve done together

[Again, all the robotics and machinery in the room cut out, leaving behind an uncanny silence. The text is gone. The blinking screen is gone. Now, Fiddleford hears a soft, canned voice crackling up through the nearest radio speaker.

It’s a child’s promise, high-pitched and mischievous.]

if youre not with me then youre the enemy
im not the bad guy
thats you when you tried to cut me away from my vessel

i wont forget how you loved me fiddleford
what a good friend you were before you gave it up
and ill make sure you never forget what you did to me

[GAME OVER marquees across the screen in bright technicolor text, and beneath the all-caps script is a blocky, cartoonish caricature of Fiddleford with Xs over his eyes and a splotch of red over his mouth.]

[terribibble]

[Oh hey wow he doesn't like that

Especially he doesn't like the words 'my vessel'. Like this isn't Elias he's speaking to. Like it's just something using the boy's body. That, he really doesn't like. Odd enough, his first thought is Marco. Marco is the easiest avenue the Fourth God has to hurt him and that means right now he's far more worried for Marco than he is for himself. He knows how willing Elias is to sacrifice his 'friends' when it might be advantageous. He wouldn't put anything past him, especially not taking advantage of the person most vulnerable to his manipulation.]

Alright.

[He doesn't bother typing; he doesn't think he can right now. His computer is a little, uh. Haunted.]

If that's how you want it to be then that's how it's goin' to be. But this is between you and me, you understand? If you're goin' to punish me you punish me.

[He's so tired of being responsible for other people getting hurt. Just for once he'd like all the consequences of his actions to fall squarely on his own shoulders.]

[fourthmade]

[The screen blanks again. This time, a yellow-haired merperson with glasses is led on-screen by the hand. A nondescript stick-figure boy leads him toward a blue portal with a plastered smile. Hearts float off of them as they zap away to another world.

A whole line of merpeople follow, along with other cartoonish, hellishly blocky conglomerations of the Fog’s monster children. All of them parade through the portal with smiley faces etched on their faces, until only Fiddleford is left behind with a cloud hovering over his head.

A skull and crossbones blinks repeatedly within the cloud.

Elias’s voice crackles softly again, childish and contrite.]

i know who my true friends are
theyll get what they earn
and we will make it away from her
without you

goodbye fiddleford
if you change your mind
ill always be here
its never too late to start over again

[One last heart appears on screen and cracks into two, crumbling to bits at the bottom of the monitor.

And then the text document returns, fully blank, blinking and awaiting Fiddleford McGucket’s next message. Elias is gone.]

[terribibble]

[Yeah. Yeah, he, uh. Doesn't type anything else. Instead he closes the text document and then the computer for good measure.

It's just Elias messing with him in a way that he knows will work because Elias used to know him better than most anyone. It's not real. It's not something he has to really be afraid of.

Unless it is. Unless, when it came down to it, Marco would leave him just like Emma-May did. Unless he's made the wrong choice again and driven a wedge between them that he can never take back and every day the gulf is getting wider and he can't fix it now because the problem is something deep within himself that even after years of trying he hasn't been able to change.

Deep breath.

He gets up and goes to find Marco.]